The nature of goals and the seven properties of goals:

Nature of goals: a goal is a state communicator want to achieve

An interpersonal goal is something one person want to achieve that is linked to another person’s
thoughts, feelings, or actions

7 properties of goals:

1.) Goals in abstractness

a. there are 3 levels of abstraction: Supraordinate, Basic, and Subordinate
b. Supraordinate: they are general and inclusive. “ to be friendly” “ to be strong” “ to be a
winner” reflect supra ordinate goals
c. Basic Goals: They provide more specificity in terms of actor’s motives and relationships,
For example: “to share an activity” identifies the motive interacting ( to go out and do
something) as well as the relationship (friend or peer) the goal assumes
i. Basic goals are an efficient way of describing what communication interactions
routinely occur
d. Subordinate goals: They are very specific and are quite distinct from other goals.
2.) People engage in multiple goals
a. Primary goals: are the most important to the communicator
b. Secondary Goals: are less important to the communicator, but they affect the way that
people communicate in order to obtain their primary goals
3.) Goals differ in urgency
a. Proximal Goals: goals that occur in the immediate future
i. Motivate us in our daily life – increases with prominent or how relevant
b. Distal Goals: those that must be realized in the distant future
c. Trans-active Goals: goals discovered during the conflict itself. Interaction with people.

Three kinds of goals that people seek to achieve:

1.) Self-Presentation Goal: Identity Management

a. Always how you are seen / come across
b. High importance to low importance
c. Part of your identity
d. We perform frame work: friendly, funny, intelligent
2.) Relational:
a. We maintain or neglect our relationships ( mange relationships)
b. Relationships are the products of our interpersonal communication.
c. How we communicate depends in turn on the nature and quality of our relationships
i. Escalating: Growing more intimate and more interdependent
ii. Maintain: activates and communication behaviors used to sustain a healthy
relationship
iii. De-escalating: drifting apart

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 3.) Instrumental:
a. We try to get others to do us a favor or offer some kind of resource
b. Desire for self-advancement
i. Getting a ride to school, obtaining a day off
c. Process / Act/ “getting it done”
d. What you want to be achieved

Social Cognition: the cognitive structures and processes that influence our perceptions of others and
social events.

Schemata: Unwritten rules/ maps/ system used to analyze and re act to situations and people

Four types of Schemata:

1.) Role: How are analyze / react to different

a. Way we expect people, based on occupation, gender, race and etc. To abide by certain
norms and behaviors.
2.) Event Schemas: How we perceive a situation, develop different ones for individuals,
a. Representing the sequences of events that characterize particular, frequently
encountered, social occasions: ordering a meal or buying a newspaper
3.) Personal: Develop for a certain individual Ex: Role in a family
a. Organized sets of knowledge about features and characteristics, the social
categorization of others.
4.) Self: Self perception
a. Having to do with our knowledge of ourselves
5.) Relationship: analyze a relationship – expectations
a. “interconnected slots”

Interpersonal Expectations and describe how they can create reality:

1.) Self-filling prophecies

a. Predictions about future interactions that lead us to behave in ways that ensure the
interaction unfold as we predicted.
2.) Pygmalion effect
a. As a part of this process we expect and look for particular attributes and behaviors in
the other person and ignore that factor which we do not expect. This helps confirm our
suspicions. It also downplays the importance of these behaviors for the target person
3.) Relational expectations
a. The reward outweighs the cost. Social exchange theory
4.) Stereotyping
a. predictive generalizations based on a category we place people in and is often done
because it is simple

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Effective Listening: Listening is a key aspect of the process, as it provides direct access to the
other person's responses, allows you to understand his concerns and priorities and gives cues
as to how you might best continue to communicate.
-More about listening than speaking - - better understanding

Three types of Effective Listening:

1.) Active Listening: ( Directions, Get information) Listening that you are engaged in.
( not passive)
a. Listen in order to understand / gain information ( “You are saying?”, signals –
head nob)
2.) Deliberative
a. Analyze what’s being sad
b. Questions? Clarify? Backing? Warrants? Consistent? Contradict from before?
c. Evaluating incoming information.
3.) Empathic
a. Listening to what people are feeling
b. Understand what people are feeling
c. Set aside judgment, empathize with them

Verbal communication:

1.) Semantic Code ( Dictionary - - code book )

a. Meaning of the code ( Must be known )
b. Individual bits  words ( must understand the word)
c. L c c c ↄj
i. Dog: image of a dog is different for everyone – meaning in your head--
learned the code
d. More words you know more complex you think
e. Greater level of awareness / seeing world
i. Better at define subtle cues
2.) Syntactic Code
a. Way the words are put together to have meaning
b. How to order the words to make sense
3.) Pragmatic Code
a. How the words are used
b. The way we really use them
c. Really talk to each other
d. Words change in meaning - - slang

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Grice’s Principle of Cooperation: 4 rules

1.) Maxim of Quantity

a. Enough talking - - but not too much little / more
b. Self-disclosure - - intimacy
c. Reciprocity Principle: expectation if disclosure is released it is expected to be
returned.
d. How much is offered - - little to much
2.) Maxim of Quality
a. Basic expectation value / truthful / fact or not / opinion
b. Let people know – I heard this from etc…
3.) Maxim of Relation
a. Expectation to return a relevant answer to subject
b. Relevance in conversation
4.) Maxim of Manner
a. Say what you want to say in the “right way”
b. In context
c. Observing rules and how they should be said

Confirming: the essence of feeling known and validated and respected

1.) Recognize the person is there – recognize their presents

2.) Acknowledgement -- Express a person significance / worth
3.) Endorsement -- Accept the persons way of life / experience life
4.) Willingness to be involved with the person

-“Hello,” “How are you?” “Bad?” “ I am sorry you are hurt” “ What you are feeling is okay”

Disconfirming:

1.) showing indifference ( no emotional connection) to the other

2.) disconfirming by imperviousness (ignoring / irrelevance what they talking about)
3.) Disconfirming by cancelling the other out indirectly ( not engaging in the topic – change
topic).

-“Hey” “ silence…” “So, I feel bad today” “ You will get over it” “ But, I really do feel bad” “ You shouldn’t
feel that way”

Ethnocentrism: The belief that one’s culture is superior to all others and the consequent belief that
other groups are inferior

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Expressive Design Logic: The way we use language

1.) Expressive message design logic

a. Language to express say your feeling – who you are
b. “Tell you like I see it”
c. Valued in individualistic
2.) Conventional message design logic
a. Purpose of language to keep the social order in tact
b. Not hurt feelings – say opposite things
c. Protect conventional social order
d. Keep face intact
e. Communication not always straight forward --- implied
f. Context: not being said - - implied
g. Collectivist
3.) Rhetorical message design logic
a. Understand language is both expressive and conventional
b. Language used to achieve goals
c. Goals (tools) accomplished by expressive and conventional
d. Switch

Individualistic Culture:
-Value of the culture focuses on rights and movements of individuals

Collectivist Culture:
-value is focused on the group (family group) to contribute to the whole group

The Three Cues:

1.) Intrinsic: cues include behaviors that have a direct relationship to a biologically shared signal
system, would be understood by anyone at any time, are innate
2.) Iconic: cues are those behaviors that stem from this biological base but are used purposefully or
in some modified way. AKA semblances- signs that resemble their referents but are expressed
voluntarily
3.) Arbitrary: cues are created within a social or cultural group to convey meanings specific to that
group

Avenues of Communication:

1.) Kinetics
a. Involves Body movement / Body Language
b. Commonly Gestures
i. Culturally created
ii. Hand movements
iii. Facial expression

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 iv. Eye movement
2.) Haptic
a. Touch
b. Meaning
3.) Vocalics
a. Express with voice, not language
b. Tone and high or low
c. Way it expressed
4.) Proxemics
a. how we use personal space while interacting
b. “personal space / bubble”
c. Power = space says something
d. Physical space
5.) Chromatics
a. Use of time, what is communicated
i. To early - - to late?
b. Environment:
i. Observe the environment ( all the messages)
6.) Artifacts
a. Created or altered by people on purpose

From the movie: 93% nonverbal - - 7% Verbal

Gestures as emblems:
-we are using them whenever we use our bodies to communicate something that could also have been
communicated with words. Ex. waving “hello”

Gestures as illustrators:
-providing a visual image of something we are saying or to which we are referring

Gestures as regulators:
-to punctuate the rhythm or importance of what we are saying such as accentuating a point by hitting
the table as we speak about it

Paralanguage:
- vocal cues include the rate, pitch, character, volume, and amount of variation used as we speak. Also
includes our use of silence

Synchrony :
-can occur in many forms (ex. mirroring, mimicry, or behavioral meshing), but overall it refers to the
amount of coordination in people’s behaviors (ex. 2 ppl move in the same ways, behaviors fit with each
other’s). When 2 or more peoples’ nonverbal cues are in sync with one another, the relational message
sent is usually solidarity, agreement, support, and attraction

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Intimacy:
-the closeness that people feel for or express to one another

Immediacy:
-part of how actively engaged we are in an interaction

Deception:

1.) Facial Expression and Gaze

 Blinking
 Pupil Dilation
2.) Kinesics – body movement
 Adaptors – rubbing hands or arms together
3.) Vocalics
 Response Length
 Speech Errors
 Speech Hesitation